Michael Bay is a No-Talent Hack and This is Why

Michael Bay is a No-Talent Hack and This is Why

A Blog By

Mitchell A. Quondam

It would be one thing if Michael Bay were merely a bad director. Bay is, in fact, a very bad director, evidenced not just by the more epic and bombastic flourishes of his movies but, rather, how he cannot handle even the basic tasks of a filmmaker:  transitions between scenes, constructing coherent story lines, or conveying motion through space and time in a clear, logical fashion.

There is a sequence in Transformers 2 where characters go into the National Air and Space Museum in Virginia and exit to an abandoned airfield under vast Arizona skies. No explanation or plot device was given to this. It is not as if one has to know where those two things are to know they do not go together.
There is a fine line between signature style and simply repeating oneself continually. This point is shown quite literally in Transformers 3. Consider the collage making its way around the internet clearly showing Bay recycling footage from his previous flop The Island.

Bay's films are also the purest representation of the triumph of shareholder cinema, where a film's quality is irrelevant as long as it offers a suitable return on investment. Bay himself does not show a great interest in principle or any other impediment to maximum profit. In a pre-taped address to the crowd of theater owners at this year's CinemaCon, Bay said, "Do you remember last year how I said I'd never do 3-D? Well, I lied ..."
That kind of willingness to sell out in the name of cashing in becomes even more grim as people look past Bay's own directorial work to look at the films he has produced from his Platinum Dunes production company; a series of low-quality remakes of films that did not need to be remade, such as Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare on Elm Street. The idea that the money made by bad films goes to make more bad films is a Hollywood tradition, but with Bay the trick seems even crueler and more disheartening as the production sewer line is opened up to full flow.

But perhaps the greatest offense that Bay has committed is this: He gives big, loud action a bad name by making films out of weak, bloated and cliché-riddled scripts and worse, he does not have to. Sporadic flashes of skill are evident in some of Bay's films. He even won a Saturn Award, and even received a plethora of Oscar nominations for Armageddon, an average film with great action sequences.

The man also knows how to construct an eye-catching image, even if he saves it for weird moments. There is no excuse for Bay to be making films as shoddy and expensive and lazy as Armageddon, Bad Boys II or the Transformers films. It is like watching a student who could be doing A-level work act out instead of focusing.
Another topic that has aroused controversy is his portrayal of women in his films. His cinematography, such as it was, in the first two Transformers movies was dedicated entirely to showing off the leading lady Megan Fox as a sex object, a trait he repeated in Transformers 2. After Megan Fox got tired of it and left the project, he needed to find a new actress, but instead of signing on a professional actress who could actually act, he found a Victoria’s Secret model that was popular at the time and put her in. So far this has been her only acting role. There are other examples of this too. Along with the sex object role, he limits his female characters to being damsels in distress, girls who are only in the movie to be captures or endangered by the villain and rescued by the hero. This is in stark contrast to the way most modern directors try to mix it up.

There is a director very similar to Bay named James Cameron. Cameron is also an action director who has targeted the 14-25 audience. However he has become incredibly popular for using powerful female characters as a recurring theme in his films, something Bay, and many others have never done or even considered. Some of his best include the characters Sarah Connor in the Terminator, Ellen Ripley in Aliens, and Neytiri, the blue alien from Avatar. These are only the most popular from Cameron; there is a myriad of others.

Bay once said, defending his honor, "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime." The crime is not the act, it is the execution. James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and JJ Abrams make movies for teenage boys, but they also make them exceptional movies with character, with care, with craft, with substance under the spectacle and with a sense of personality, not just Bay's endless series of quick cuts and soft-focus lighting and slapdash storytelling with cheap sentiment as a substitute for real emotion. With Michael Bay, what is frustrating is not merely the films that are, but the films that one can imagine if only he would quit being lazy, put in real work and prove that a good movie can make money, too.

It would be one thing if Michael Bay was a bad director, but he is in fact a very bad director. He puts more effort into making big set-piece action scenes and portraying women as sex objects and damsels in distress, and less effort into actually writing a good movie with solid characters and real emotional weight. He only uses half his potential, and it is sad that audiences will never get to see what might have been with him. Perhaps next year we will get something better from him.